By J.D. Lasica

From Chapter One

Growing up in a flyspeck town in Southern Mississippi in the early1980s, ten-year-old Chris Strompolos stared out his bedroom window anddreamed. He fantasized about what it would be like for a whiff ofadventure to breeze through his humdrum little burg. On a sticky Juneafternoon in 1981 he found a vehicle for his wanderlust in thedarkness of a local movie theater. He watched, jaw agape, as HarrisonFord outran a rolling boulder, dodged a swarm of blow darts, anddangled over a pit of slithering snakes in Raiders of the LostArk.

Chris Strompolos was blown away. The movie captured his imaginationlike nothing he had ever encountered. He thought, I want to do that.

And so he did.

Chris first mentioned his outlandish idea to an older kid, Eric Zala,a seventh-grader at their school in Gulfport. Chris did not suggest aquick and easy backyard tribute to Raiders that they could pull off ona summer weekend. Oh, no. He proposed shooting a scene-by-scenere-creation of the entire movie. He wanted to create a pull-out-all-the-stops remake of Steven Spielberg’s instant blockbuster, which was filmed on a $20 million budget and made $242 million in U.S. movie theaters.

Chris and Eric agreed they would have to cut a few corners, giventheir somewhat more modest savings account, but, yes, of course theycould do it! Eric, a budding cartoonist, began sketching out costumesfor each of the characters. Soon a third movie-loving misfit, JaysonLamb, came on board. Jayson was already heavily into special effects,makeup, puppetry, and lighting. He took charge of the camerawork witha bulky Sony Betamax video camera. Eric created storyboards for eachof the movie’s 649 scenes. The outgoing, slightly chubby Chris assumedthe lead role of Indiana Jones.

The production took on a life of its own. Months passed, then years.

On birthdays the boys asked for props and gear: Chris got a bullwhip, Eric a fedora. Jayson bought a VHS camcorder after a summer ofdelivering pizzas and saving money. Weekends were spent not hitting abaseball or playing a new game called Atari but in memorizing lines,creating plaster face masks, and filming take after take until theyknew they nailed a scene exactly right.

Nearly seven years later, they wrapped.

The result, according to those who have seen the work—including Harry Knowles, creator of the movie fan site Ain’t It Cool News, and VanityFair writer Jim Windolf—is a filmic tour de force.

In the teenagers’ version of Raiders, the actors grow older in thespan of a few minutes. Voices deepen. Chris sprouts chin whiskers andgrows six inches. He gets his first-ever kiss by a girl, capturedonscreen. The girl who plays Marion, the Karen Allen character,develops breasts. Over the course of the movie the kids jump throughwindows; blow up a truck; sew together forty traditional Arabcostumes; fill a basement with pet snakes; create giant Egyptianstatues; surround Indy with spear-carrying, half-clothed blondwarriors; dress up friends as prepubescent Nazis and Himalayanhenchmen with glued-on beards; and kill Eric’s little brother Kurtover and over again. In one special effect, an actor is shot, and fakeblood oozes out of a condom hidden in his shirt. The filmmakers alsomade some inspired substitutions: a motorboat replaced a plane,Chris’s puppy filled in for Marion’s pet monkey, downtown Gulfportstood in for Cairo, a dirt mound became the Sahara. But they had doneit, a faithful re-creation of the original film: the rolling boulderbearing down on Indy in a cave in Peru (actually, Eric’s mom’sbasement), the live asps (actually, rat snakes and boas), the WorldWar II submarine, the 1936 copy of Life magazine, the pulse-racingtruck sequence. And everywhere, explosions and fire and flames.(Jayson would later explain how they managed to pull off thepyrotechnics: “I’m like twelve years old and was able to go into astore and buy gunpowder.” This was, after all, Mississippi.)

They had a few misadventures, like the time they built a fake boulder in Chris’s room and discovered they couldn’t get it out the door. Orthe time they poured three inches of industrial plaster over Eric’shead to make a face mold; when it wouldn’t come off, they rushed himto a hospital to remove it in a procedure that cost Eric his eyelashesand half an eyebrow. Or the time they re-created the bar scene inNepal where the entire set was set ablaze. Eric played a Nepalesevillager whose outfit catches fire, and nobody could put it out untilChris resourcefully grabbed a fire extinguisher.

When filming ended and editing was completed at a professional studio, the boys’ families staged a world premiere in Gulfport, complete withtuxes and a stretch limo. Almost two hundred friends, family, and castmembers turned out to watch the hundred-minute film. But soon theirlittle masterwork became all but forgotten as they parted ways andwent on to college and careers.

Then, one day in early 2003, it resurfaced. At the New York University film school, which Eric Zala had attended, someone passed along ayears-old videotape of the movie to the horror film director Eli Roth.Roth did not know the boys, but he was bowled over by what he saw. Heslipped a copy to an executive at DreamWorks, where it quickly foundits way into the hands of the master himself. Spielberg watched it—andloved it. Days later, he wrote letters to all three amateur auteurs.”Wanted to write and let you know how impressed I was with your veryloving and detailed tribute to our Raiders of the Lost Ark. I saw andappreciated the vast amounts of imagination and originality you putinto your film. I’ll be waiting to see your names one day on the bigscreen.”

Roth also shared a copy of the video with Knowles and Tim League, owner of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, Texas, who wereequally impressed. League set aside three days in late May 2003 forthe “world premiere” showing of Raiders of the Lost Ark: TheAdaptation, though before the screening he was careful to sub out theJohn Williams musical score because of copyright fears. The trailer ofStrompolos dodging a giant boulder sparked such interest in the weeksleading up to the event that hundreds of people had to be turned awayat the door.

Flying in for the occasion were all three filmmakers: Strompolos, now an independent film producer in Los Angeles; Zala, who works in thevideo game industry in Florida; and Lamb, an audiovisual technician inOakland. The three men, now in their early thirties, hadn’t seen eachother in years, and they were a bit baffled by why anyone would turnout to see their childhood project. To their amazement, the screeningwas packed to the rafters. The audience watched Chris Strompolos withhis wiseacre smirk and rumpled fedora capture the spirit of Indy. Theywatched, mesmerized, as the kids credibly pulled off one scene afteranother.

When the credits rolled and the screen went dark, the audience gave them a four-minute standing ovation—almost twenty years to the dayafter they had shot their first scene.

Knowles wrote on his Web site the next day: “I feel this is the bestdamn fan film I’ve ever seen. The love and passion and sacrifice is on every single frame of this thing. . . . This is what fandom to me is about. . . . This is the dream of what films can do. Motivate kids to learn and make it.”

Vanity Fair’s Windolf agreed: “We have been so entertained for so long that we have, in a way, reached the end of entertainment. An audiencejaded by one mega-budget blockbuster after another is all too readyfor an action movie made with love instead of money.”

It would be wonderful if audiences everywhere could share the love. Only a few hundred people have ever seen Raiders: The Adaptation. Butthe boys are older now and wise to the bare-knuckle realities of federal law. A work that bears “substantial similarity” to the original copyrighted work is punishable by up to a year in prison and a $50,000 fine—even if not a dime changes hands. Happily, Spielbergand Lucasfilm have no intention of pressing charges, but the young menare taking no chances. Strompolos no longer passes out copies of thefilm to those who want to see it. In fact, he has asked those who dopossess copies to return them to him, for fear that the remake willwind up in the Darknet.

As a lark, Strompolos invited Lucasfilm and Spielberg to include their home-brew tribute in the Indiana Jones DVD boxed set that came out in2003. The studio passed. Lamb then bought an old three-quarter-inchSony Betamax on eBay so they could digitize hundreds of feet of oldouttakes, and in early 2004 a Hollywood producer bought the rights totell the boys’ story. As for showing their Raiders homage to others,Strompolos tells me, “We have legal constraints. We can’t takeadvantage of opportunities for theatrical release or home videobecause the intellectual property doesn’t belong to us.”

Thus the law gives us the absurdity that you will be able to watch adocumentary about the teens’ undertaking, but you won’t be able towatch Raiders: The Adaptation itself. If you want to see our youngheroes’ handiwork, you’ll have to wait until the year 2076, when theoriginal Raiders copyright expires (unless Congress extends copyrightterms yet again). The boys will be teeing off on their 105th birthdaysright about then.